The present invention generally relates to information technology (IT).
For some organizations, the one size fits all solution to IT performance issues, such as, for example, high execution times, is the time honored American tradition of “buying more stuff”. More specifically, when faced with performance issues, an organization frequently adds additional infrastructure to try to improve performance. However, this additional infrastructure can increase cooling and power requirements, increase maintenance costs, and introduce additional operational complexity. Further, changes can create a need for higher network bandwidth requirements to ensure that highly collaborative elements can communicate effectively. Moreover, an organization has to put all its “stuff” somewhere, and, the more hardware it adds, the further apart some of it ends up, thus potentially causing the organization to fall victim to the horrors of IT sprawl. More specifically, as distances between physical tiers of infrastructure grow larger, performance can be affected via the increase of overall execution time required to perform work, which can in turn cause an organization to . . . buy (even) more stuff. Continuing efforts to compensate for performance impacts can create a downward spiral of cost, efficiency, and performance, often leading to decisions that include expanding or building new data centers, which are prohibitively expensive and time consuming.
Unfortunately, aside from limited individualized guidance for particular elements, it has traditionally been difficult to find cohesive, methodical, or customized assistance in implementing the various tasks associated with IT design, operations, and management.
Some assistance in conceptualizing the relationship between IT and business needs was provided by work done by Michael Porter in 1985. He introduced the concept of a business value chain (BVC), which is a generic value chain model that comprises a sequence of activities found to be common to a wide range of firms. Porter identified key activities, including policies and decisions, interrelationships, integration and scale that strongly apply to the general function(s) required of IT. However, a need remained for a systematic approach, dedicated tools, and the like to assist in the actual design and management of IT. Without these things, typical problems encountered include a lack of alignment between the BVC and IT, overlapping and missing functionality in the business platform, a continuous battle with missed customer expectations, rigid and brittle infrastructure, IT delivery and resources being unable to keep up with demand, a lack of definitive examples on how to document, a heavier reliance on tribal knowledge for how to get things done, and many others.
A need exists for improvement in IT design, operations, and management. This, and other needs, are addressed by one or more aspects of the present invention.